As a last-ditch effort to cure the constant pain on the left side of my face, I dug through my bathroom closet for something I’d purchased years ago with FSA money and never used – a neti pot.

Truth be told, I’ve been terrified of the neti pot since the second I added it to the online shopping cart. I really only bought it because we had a use it or lose it policy with FSA funds at my old job, and I had hundreds of dollars to burn through at the end of December. So a neti pot got thrown into the cart, because who knows what the future holds and I might need it someday.

Cue: someday.

I boiled water and let it cool while I pored over the instructions. From there, I checked out some YouTube videos. I was positive I was going to accidentally drown myself. When I finally got the courage to give it a go, I was surprised at how not-unpleasant it was – aside from the initial feeling of water going up my nose (taking me momentarily back to summers spent jumping off high dives and not plugging my nose), it wasn’t really weird at all. It certainly didn’t hurt, which is what I was expecting, but based on how the rest of my face feels, I really can’t tell if that’s true or not (plus, I’ve been pretty heavily medicated since Monday). But yeah, it wasn’t bad at all. I was a little disappointed, though, that nothing seemed to come out of my nose, aside from water. Secretly I was hoping that a giant snot rocket would shoot out and suddenly everything would feel 100% better. Yeah, no. That didn’t happen. No snot at all, actually, which seems weird considering MedExpress thinks I have a sinus infection. Hmm. WEIRD.

Anyway, the neti pot didn’t help, but I’m going to keep trying it a few more times now that I’m no longer terrified of it. Maybe it takes a few uses for the snot rockets to fly? At least it didn’t hurt my face any further, and that’s all I can ask for right now.